Considered to be father of modern story telling manga, and is often called the God of Manga, Osamu Tezuka was one of the most influential forces that shaped manga into what it is today. Born in 1928 in pre-war Japan to a very open minded family, Tezuka grew up reading comics (both Japanese and American), hearing fantastical stories of far away lands from his mother and watching Disney animation on his father’s projector. Seeing the horrors of World War 2 first hand Tezuka developed a profound understanding of the value of life and began studying medicine. Though Tezuka eventually did receive his doctorate of medicine in 1958, at the time the pull of manga was too strong and he left university to move to Tokyo to become a professional manga artist debuting his first major work New Treasure Island. As a top selling manga artist Tezuka helped pioneer new genres of story telling from shojo comics for girls to the erotic and serious gekiga and avant-garde manga. He also started his own animation studio Mushi Productions around 1962 after working for four years producing animated films for Toei. On his animation career Tezuka was quoted saying this “Manga is the wife I’m already married to and animation is the mistress I yearn for, but a mistress that costs a lot of money” (Tezuka Productions 1991, my own translation). Producing theatrical and television serials of his most popular manga works: Jungle Emperor, Princess Knight and the immensely popular Astro Boy, all big hits in the West, Tezuka paved the way for Japanese anime and manga to be spread all over the world. In 1989 Osamu Tezuka passed away at the age of 60 from stomach cancer, in his career he drew over 700 manga with more than 150,000 pages (Brophy 2006), Takayuki Matsutani, president of Mushi Productions wrote that his last words were on his death bed “please I’m begging you, let me work!”
More to come…
